He was taking a gamble, but Corbin Gwaltney '43 was convinced it
would pay off. So the 28-year-old withdrew the last $100 from his
savings account, bought some photographs of Johns Hopkins
buildings, and hired a calligrapher to pen "Johns Hopkins
Magazine." It would become the nameplate for the front cover of
the magazine "dummy" he was creating.

The year was 1949 and Gwaltney had a vision for a new kind of
university magazine. A magazine that would serve up substantive
stories about the people and the work at Johns Hopkins, with
Life-quality photography. A magazine that would be a
source of
continuing education for alumni, rather than simply a repository
of class notes, fundraising pitches, and campus news.

But before he could publish the first issue, he had to sell the
idea to the university's powers-that-be.

So Gwaltney put together the dummy. In it, he included the idea
for a photo-laden story on the university's Chesapeake Bay
Institute, as well as an article on Hopkins's foray into
television with the weekly Johns Hopkins Science Review
program.

Provost P. Stewart Macaulay, a former newspaperman, and others
liked what they saw, so they gave their alumnus carte blanche--
and about $40,000 in annual funding, as Gwaltney remembers it--to
produce nine issues a year.

Gwaltney set to work with new assistant editor Ellen Watson, a
recent Wellesley grad who'd done reporting for the Baltimore
Sun.
Six months later, in April 1950, the first issue of Johns
Hopkins Magazine landed in the mailboxes of the university's
alumni.

Bronk, it turns out, had envisioned a magazine more along the
lines of the MIT Technology Review--highly technical and
seriously scientific. Macaulay and others on the
Magazine's
editorial board successfully convinced Bronk to give the
fledgling magazine a chance. Bronk did, and one year later, it
was named the 1951 Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year--the best
college or university magazine in the country. During Gwaltney's
decade as editor, the Magazine would be similarly honored
twice more, in 1956 and 1959.

The Johns Hopkins Magazine "changed the whole alumni
publishing
field, as one after another young editor, mentored largely by
Corbin, would take over alumni publications" and implement a
similar philosophy, says Ron Wolk, who joined the Hopkins
Magazine staff in 1958.

Wolk remembers taking the job with some misgivings, thinking:
What am I doing at an alumni magazine? I want to edit
LIFE or Look. His attitude softened after a summer
spent combing the
Magazine's files. "There were letters in there from some
of the
country's greatest photographers and editors, complimenting the
Johns Hopkins Magazine," he recalls. "Corbin had really
attracted attention in the commercial publishing world. I
realized, somewhat belatedly, that I had joined a pioneering
magazine."

A TIME article would later praise Gwaltney for creating "a
model
of lively thought," while Newsweek wrote approvingly of
the
Magazine's "cerebral qualities." SHOW, the Magazine of the
Arts, wrote, "Both the photographs and text are of a quality that
many consumer magazines might well envy."

Gwaltney hired photographers like Werner Wolff, Robert Mottar,
and Erich Hartmann from big-league photo studios like Black Star
and Magna. For $100 a day plus expenses, they would take the
train from New York to Baltimore's Penn Station. Then Gwaltney
whisked them off to campus to shoot portraits of visiting poets
like Robert Frost and e.e. cummings, or to the Hopkins Hospital
operating room to document pioneering eye surgery in breathtaking
detail.

Watson, who remained at the Magazine until 1954, remembers
spending hours with Gwaltney laying out the Magazine's
pages.
They'd move shapes (which represented photos) around on a page,
first this way, then that. More often than not, they'd come back
the next day, tear up what they'd done, and start over. The idea
of running large, close-up photos, and "bleeding" them out to the
edge of the page, á la LIFE magazine, was a
"radical" departure
from the "grip-and-grin" snapshots that appeared in so many
alumni magazines at that time, Watson recalls.

1951

1955

1956

The Johns Hopkins Magazine in its first decade was
published
monthly throughout the academic year--October through June--with
a full-time staff of just two. Gwaltney and Watson tackled much
of the writing themselves. The task they set for themselves, of
writing about the specialized work going on at Hopkins in a
compelling way that would be fathomable to the educated
layperson, "was all virgin territory," Watson recalls.

Headquarters for the tiny staff was a small room in the
Greenhouse, the campus's original botanical lab that sits
adjacent to the President's House. Loath to spend a nickel out
of his precious budget on office supplies, Gwaltney himself took
charge of laying the office's asphalt floor tile; he also built
his own desks, copying a design by Florence Knoll. The room's
Bunsen burners, vestiges of its former incarnation as a lab,
Gwaltney recalls, "were very handy for starting the morning
coffee."

Working in a greenhouse had its advantages, as Gwaltney pointed
out to readers in a 1955 Editor's Note. "Even in mid-February,
you can get up from your typewriter and escape in a matter of
three steps. You can put yourself in the midst of flowering
azalea bushes, or take a whiff of the chocolate orchids (which
smell like a candy store)."

The downside was the room's excessive humidity, which quickly
took its toll on his hand-crafted desks: "We arrived one morning
to find that our office furniture had collapsed, its glue
evidently weakened by the moisture-laden air that billows into
our cubicle when the plants are watered; and after a couple of
futile attempts at repair, we gave up the job. Now it is
principally gravity (good old gravity) that holds our furniture
together, and visitors to our office who once lean against a desk
are never likely to do so again. They, and the desk, are apt to
land in a crashing heap on the floor."

Gwaltney made it clear from the beginning that the
Magazine would
report honestly on the university. "I really truly loved Hopkins
very much," he says, "yet I tried to approach it as a journalist
would, always asking the hard question." As a mentor to other
young alumni magazine editors, he argued the virtues of editorial
independence, contending that editors should be given the same
sort of academic freedom afforded to university professors.

Gwaltney's convictions were put to the test midway through his
tenure at Hopkins, when the Magazine was moved out of the
Provost's Office to report to Development. Gwaltney staged what
he today describes as "a little strike." The move was quickly
rescinded.

In 1957, the 35-year-old "dean" of alumni magazine publishing got
together in New York with editors from 10 other colleges and
universities. The group wanted to collaborate on an editorial
project that would examine issues in higher education, allowing
them, in Gwaltney's words, "to place our own institutions in some
kind of perspective." The meeting took place on the same day that
the first Sputnik circled the Earth. 'They're shooting for the
moon," noted one of the editors. Gwaltney responded, "So are we."
Thus, the Moonshooter project was born.

Each editor pledged 60 percent of one issue of his or her
magazine to fund the supplement. Almost on a whim they offered
the first one, "American Higher Education, 1958," to editors at
other universities as well, at five cents a copy. Gwaltney says
they were amazed to sell 1.35 million copies to 15 colleges and
universities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. By the project's
third year, circulation surpassed 3 million.

The workload for Gwaltney mushroomed to the point that it was
impossible to do both jobs. So in 1959, he left Johns Hopkins
Magazine to become the first full-time employee of the
fledgling Editorial Projects for Education (later renamed
Editorial Projects in Education). It was during his work with EPE
that
Gwaltney came to realize that "higher education in general would
benefit from a news publication."

He and other board members of EPE got together and laid out plans
for a new publication. It would be called The Chronicle of
Higher Education. Today, the weekly newspaper is considered
the Wall Street Journal of higher education. Gwaltney
remains executive
editor and chairman of the board, and continues to edit and
monitor the paper's production from his home office.

Gwaltney left the Johns Hopkins Magazine in good hands.
Ron Wolk,
editor from 1959 until 1962, went on to win a Sibley Award in
1961. To date, Johns Hopkins Magazine has won nine Sibley
awards over the years--more than any other college or university
magazine in the nation.

The magazine born in a greenhouse is still shooting for the
moon--and beyond.